For White Lies, I asked her to come up with a cover that would help me to build a brand. I wanted something that would be recognisably an “Ellie Holmes cover”. Pinning down that elusive idea was never going to be easy. We made a few false turns on the way but I thought you might find it useful to see where we started and where we finished up.

In order to build the brand we used the same font for my name and the title of the book but not the same colours – hard to use cerise pink for the title when the book is called White Lies. We also used an image of a woman walking away as another echo of The Flower Seller.

My two favourites were the lower two images. I love the autumnal colours of the image on the left but I was initially drawn to the image on the right. We almost went for the summer image but at the last minute I became worried that it was too similar to The Flower Seller.

I wanted to build a brand, remember but The Flower Seller and White Lies are stand alone stories. They may be set in the same location and feature some of the same places and minor characters but they are not part of a series. I was concerned that if I went for the summer cover it was actually too much like The Flower Seller and readers may think I was indicating the books were part of a series. This brand building stuff is complicated!

It took four more contact sheets of the lower two images, with various tweaks along the way, before we finally hit on a version that worked. I think when a reader sees The Flower Seller and White Lies side by side they will identify a brand through the fonts and the figure but not be misled into thinking they are part of a series. I hope so, anyway.